How Old, Broken Dishes Can Advance Research and Create Citizen Scientists
Author(s): Sara Pfannkuche
Year: 2025
Summary
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
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Legacy donations can be a collections nightmare for repositories, CRM firms, and museums. Prior to the professionalization of archaeological collection management, donations often arrived without documentation, funding, or even a clear intent to study them. Beginning in 2022, the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS) initiated a plan to document and verify its 865.2 ft<sup>3</sup> of legacy donations to ensure they are inventoried, properly housed, and attached to a funding source. In this way, we hope to make them more accessible and useful to researchers and descendant communities.
ISAS chose the Bell Street Privy collection as a test case to see if teaching interested volunteers to properly curate legacy donations could be a successful partnership. ISAS reached out to East Central Illinois Archaeological Society (ECIAS), an avocational archaeology group, to clean, record, inventory, and stabilize the donation of an assemblage excavated in 2001 from a 19th century privy in Alton, Illinois. This presentation will discuss how this project came together, how the members of ECIAS became Citizen Scientists to help protect our cultural heritage, and the research possibilities that historic artifact collections such as this can offer current researchers once they are properly curated.
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Cite this Record
How Old, Broken Dishes Can Advance Research and Create Citizen Scientists. Sara Pfannkuche. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 510994)
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Record Identifiers
Abstract Id(s): 53243